Fifty Ways
by Scribbler
Summary: one shot Wanda and Kitty: the aftermath. After the trials and tribulations of their relationship and break up, how exactly did Wanda cope with Kitty's plea for help in Ascension? Sequel to Girl With the Broken Smile.


**_Disclaimer _**– Property of Marvel Comics, KidsWB, and many other people who are not even close to being me.

**_A/N_ **– One day I might write the break-up story properly. But not today. For Bossu! and ChaosWolf, because they asked so nicely. Contains a few lines from Billy Joel's _She's Always a Woman_ – which I also don't own, by the way.

**_Continuity _**– Spoilers for _Ascension_ (little bit of I, lotta II). This story is actually the sequel to _Girl with the Broken Smile_. There's a slim chance it'd make sense without reading that first, but really you're better off starting there if you want the full effect.

**_Feedback_** – Begged for. Pleaded for. Granted certain favours for.

**

* * *

** Fifty Ways 

By Scribbler

September 2004

* * *

_There must be fifty ways to leave your lover _– Paul Simon

* * *

1.

Wanda trod carefully down the path. The grass needed mowing and the borders were all overgrown, but it was a damn sight better than it had been before that old woman set her legion of gardeners on it. They had a lean-to behind the house that hadn't been repossessed. In it stood spades and rakes and things, only gently rusted from misuse.

Kitty was half-turned. Her shoulders were slumped. Anyone else might have thought with defeat, but Wanda knew better. She knew that Kitty was a long way from being defeated. Her face still showed anger, woven in with hope – hope that her appeal had earned a response other than 'piss off and save the world yourself'.

She opened her mouth to say something, but Wanda breezed past.

"I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it because it's my father up there, and because I don't particularly want to lose our human neighbours."

Kitty's jaw clacked shut. Her eyes registered the hostility, digested it in that methodical way that made her so good with computers, but showed no argument. Evidently the X-Men were so in need of allies that even heartbreak wasn't an obstacle. Wanda felt a pang of something that there was remorse there, but no doubt. Kitty may regret what they'd lost, but she wasn't about to rescind her decision to end it.

Wanda knew her own eyes were scarily vulnerable, and had been since being left on a park bench with a hollow apology and a sense of infidelity. No matter how she tried to make them look hard and menacing, her eyes had the wounded look of a deer that's been hit by a truck and knows it's going to die soon.

She marched down the path. "Come on. I have a spare costume stashed in the tool shed."

* * *

2.

"Father, why are you doing this?"

Magneto raised his arms. Pieces of Sentinel rose into the air. There was barely time to think, let alone move out of the way or, you know, blast them into even more pieces. Wanda did the deer-in-headlights thing again and just stood there while they crashed down on top of her.

But they weren't on top of her. They bounced off her – _through_ her. And there was suddenly a cavernous feeling in the pit of her stomach, like everything she'd eaten in the last three days was only so much air. If the arms hadn't solidified around her knees, she might have thought that was what being dead felt like, and started looking around for her own mangled corpse.

"That's not your father," Kitty said sternly, air-walking out of the ground. "At least not anymore."

Her words didn't register for a second. _You saved me_ was on the tip of Wanda's tongue. It was needless communication, but it needed to be said. Kitty, her wonderful, beautiful, hateful Kitty had saved her life.

Except that Kitty had done the same for Angel when the shrapnel first started flying. And it had been Kitty who laid a hand on Havok's shoulder when they picked him up, assuring him his brother was fine and safe and they'd all meet up for milk and cookies afterwards. Kitty had piloted them here. Kitty had orchestrated things into a recognisable team-shape. Kitty was the driving force behind this whole operation.

Yes, Kitty had saved her life, but she didn't mean anything by it. She saved people she didn't like all the time. She was just altruistic that way. Kitty Pryde could no more stop saving people than she could stop breathing.

And besides, they had less chance of pulling this off if they died.

There were pieces of Sentinel in the sky again. A low hum cut the air.

_That's not your father. At least not anymore._

Magneto was putting the giant robot back together. Wanda felt Kitty stiffen beside her, saw her hand twitch out the corner of her eye. For a second the irrational part of her brain imagined she was going to take her hand and rotate her thumb in small circles, like she had done all those times when one of them needed comfort – uncontrolled outbursts of memories that shouldn't exist, tears and tantrums over a jerk who was too thick-headed to understand what he'd thrown away, mourning a father who never quite sat right in her head...

But she didn't, because Sunspot ran up and Havok looked panicky and Angel had just been slammed into a tree and wasn't moving. Kitty's hands balled into fists, and Wanda heard the knock of hammer against nail in the proverbial coffin.

"Just like we planned, people," Kitty said.

Sunspot's grin was shaky, but he took solace from Kitty's strength and threw himself at the robot. "Banzai!"

* * *

3.

It was impossible. Nothing that rickety could move that fast.

The Sentinel rolled up logic and threw it across the forest, to land somewhere in a neighbouring village the army had evacuated. Havok had to eat dirt to avoid one of its huge feet. He lay with the wind obviously knocked out of him, groaning and trying to pull himself up using a boulder.

Maybe it was because he was Cyclops's brother. Maybe it was because she was the de facto leader of this operation. Maybe it was because saving people was her obsessive compulsion. Whatever the reason, Kitty reversed her direction and ran in front of the Sentinel.

Wanda had been following her toward the pyramid, which had begun to glow an unearthly blue. Pure instinct made her jump, too.

And instinct also made her freeze.

There was something profoundly disturbing about the dead robot, walking around, more powerful than ever thanks to one of the creatures it had been designed to destroy. It was almost perverse – wrong in some fundamental sense.

But it wasn't perversity that immobilized Wanda and gummed up her brain. Instead, it was the two enormous claws the Sentinel brandished, and the way the red-cloaked figure beyond mirrored the swipe perfectly. It was raw fear and betrayal, and for a second her mind jerked in three different directions, snagged by three divergent images: the present setting, a long ago firework display with a father who loved her, a man and a small boy standing by a car in the rain while she screamed for them...

A bright flash entered her field of vision. Sunspot met the claws and shoved them away from her with his incredible strength. It was only dumb luck he hadn't been impaled. He was extra strong in that form, but not invulnerable.

Kitty grabbed Wanda's shoulders and shook her hard. "Wanda, you have to forget he's your father or we're going to lose this." Her voice had taken took on a desperate edge, the kind Wanda recognised as a mixture of frustration and rage and terror. Kitty was fraught. Her control was slipping and she was getting reckless – or as reckless as she ever did. "We _can't_ lose!"

_She's touching me_, Wanda thought dimly, through a haze of adrenaline-infused picnics and straight jackets and hypodermics filled with the brand of strawberry milkshake they stopped selling when she was thirteen. And how could she even know that they'd stopped selling it when she was locked away then, eating tasteless food from metal trays and hiding in the corner when it was time to go to the Pink Room? But no, she'd been outside and alive and happy with her father and brother and nothing was wrong. Nothing had ever been wrong. Whatever gave you that idea? It was always bright and shiny and happy and – and there was a shard of metal plating hurtling right at them.

It hit Kitty full in the back. She didn't see it coming, and so didn't know to phase. The noise was like a side of beef being dropped on a chopping board. It knocked her several feet into the air, twirling her like the Raggedy Anne doll Wanda used to take to bed when she was six. A sickening crunch heralded Kitty's arrival back on terra firma. She didn't get up from where she'd fallen.

And suddenly there was a thin tendril of clarity in Wanda's mind. She stared at the girl who had broken her heart and then had the nerve to ask for her help; stared at her lying there, helpless and vulnerable. She looked so small like that. One tiny tweak and her delicate little neck was snapped. She was just a child, really. They were all just children fighting a war the grown-ups couldn't handle.

It wasn't a stupendous revelation. There was no epiphany, no clouds parting and some echoey voice telling her to use the force, or some other clichéd mumbo jumbo. There was just her, standing and staring while chaos raged around her.

Something went click inside Wanda's mind, and she knew that none of it mattered – not really. There were far bigger things going on than her own hurt feelings and fractured memories and sort-of love for her poor, brainwashed father and real-as-she-knew love for this girl who didn't want her. The X-Men functioned as a team. If she didn't fit into that then she was just dead weight. And dead weight meant lives lost, families devastated, lovers pulled apart through no fault of their own. Yet more hurt and loss and heartache...

Someday, if they won this, if humankind survived, they'd likely make it into the history books. Some dry old scholar would catalogue them in alphabetical order; make notes on whatever this battle came to be known as. They would become household names, like generals from the World Wars and the Civil War – Patten and Churchill and Eisenhower, Ulysses Grant and Robert E. Lee. Students would study them in school, would open their textbook and voila, there they'd all be. Xavier and his X-Men, SHIELD, the rogue mutants who helped them out, the terrorists-turned-heroes, and everybody else besides.

And then the teacher would tell her story, the story of Wanda Lenscherr. She'd be part of history.

And then some smart aleck at the back would laugh and say, "Cold, man. That was really cold, what she did."

But she had to do it. That was the eye-opener. That was the clarity. This wasn't some half-baked jockeying between kinda-sorta-maybe rival teams. This was war. It was the whole point. The whole _point_, you stupid, smug, sneering, self-righteous little ignoramus who hadn't even been born yet. In war you hurt the innocent in order to stop the evil; you sacrificed the small for the big. Haven't you ever seen Star Trek? Needs of the many over the few. The big picture. The real deal.

Innocent humans. Innocent mutants. Innocent adults and kids.

How else were they to stop a mass murderer? How else were they supposed to stop fragile humans breaking apart on a sub-atomic level because their bodies couldn't handle the change to mutant?

Innocent ex-girlfriends lying where shrapnel could hit them. Innocent fathers who just wanted the best for their kids, honest, but didn't know how to pick their fights.

Wanda felt a scowl fall into place, felt unrefined power inside her like a wellspring. She knew how potent it was, how formidable she could be if she wanted. She could crush mountains and raze entire cities to the ground. She could derail trans and cause earthquakes, and she could certainly break an electromagnetic hold over a crapped out old robot.

And if someone got caught in the crossfire? Well, that was the way of war, wasn't it? That was the risk you took when you answered a plea for help like this.

Wanda aimed everything she had at the Sentinel, hurling the remnants at Magneto.

"Cold, dude. That Scarlet Witch chick was just plain cold."

* * *

4.

The fight was... over?

Hm. Well, she hadn't seen that one coming. Wanda had expected either a glorious victory or a squishified defeat. Or maybe an explosion. What was it Sunspot said on the way here? Oh yeah: "You always know where the X-Men have been, because it's on fire."

A quiet grunt from Magneto and a short fall to earth was severely underwhelming after that – and the Brotherhood hadn't featured in her possible outcomes anywhere. Which just went to show you... stuff. Something. What the hell, she was too tired to think of clever one-liners.

Todd kept rubbing himself against her and grabbing her arm. She might have blasted him away, but she was too drained to do much of anything but drag air into her lungs and watch Pietro poke their father. Fred was doing... something. Bandaging a shallow wound on his shoulder. Funny, she'd never thought about him getting hurt before. It was a tacit thing: Fred can take care of himself. You didn't ask questions about it, but now she found herself questioning just how far the term 'invulnerable' stretched.

_I guess he isn't as tough as he makes out._

Lance was helping Kitty to her feet. No matter that Angel was still comatose and Havok just coming to and Sunspot had at least three broken ribs to match the fracture in his wrist. Kitty blinked and stumbled, and when Lance caught her she held onto him tightly, as if she, too, could not believe that it was all over – really over. She'd lost her headset somewhere, and the chopper was a mess, but doubtless she'd find some way of contacting the other X-Men to find out what had gone down.

But for now...

For now it was time for triage and just coming to terms with themselves and what they'd done. They'd scarcely finished a battle for their lives. It made you think about your own mortality, just a little. Not that any of them were given to waxing poetic or venting philosophy, but a little near-death experience put the firecrackers up the wazoo, no problem. A mosaic of possibilities now stretched out before them. They had survived. They had a world and a future to look forward to.

Except that Wanda really couldn't see any point if there was nobody to share it with.

She kept staring at Pietro and Magneto, her brother and father. These were her family. They were her blood. That was supposed to mean something. Yet she couldn't quite get over the disconnected sensation. It was lodged in her belly like a chicken bone clogging a tube. She knew she was meant to love and cherish them, the same way Havok did Cyclops, and Nightcrawler did Rogue. And yet when she looked at them, all she saw were two men with white hair and some facial similarities. She couldn't even _imagine _sharing a womb with one of them. That sort of intimacy involved more emotion than he attributed to them.

­_It's probably shock,_ ­ she told herself. _I'll get over it._

She had to. She had to share that hard-earned future with them.

She glanced back at Kitty. Lance had his arm around her waist, and even though he was just supporting her weight there was something casually possessive about the gesture that made Wanda's blood run cold. Little prickles of ice raced up and down her spine, especially when Kitty looked back at him. Gratefulness made dimples in her cheeks, and there was nothing short of adoration shining in her eyes. Her knight in shining armour had finally come home to roost.

And Wanda saw the way she looked at him, and the way he looked at her, and suddenly she knew _knew_ **_knew_ **why Kitty had broken it off. For all her posturing and weeping and grand declarations of never wanting to see him again, Kitty had never stopped caring about Lance.

Wanda remembered helping Kitty tear up a love letter she'd written just before he and she parted ways. It was typical teenager-in-love stuff, prosaic in some places, downright cheesy in others. They'd burned the pieces along with a bunch of junk mail and set off the sprinklers in Kitty's room. Then Wanda had been forced to hop out the window to escape, cushioning her landing with a hex-bolt. She remembered once defending Kitty to Lance, when he made some dumb male comment about something so inane she couldn't even recollect it anymore. She remembered meeting secretly with Kitty, so her path and Lance's would not cross and reopen old wounds. She remembered hours of lovemaking in bizarre places, just so they could keep themselves secret from old boyfriends and teammates who wouldn't understand any level of what they were doing.

But in the end, it was always Lance who had held Kitty's heart in his hand. He could be a jerk all he wanted, but he'd commandeered his spot in her affections a long time ago. Wanda had never had a chance, really. And though she had convinced herself she'd truly fallen for the sweet girl who once made her bite clean through her lip to stop from screaming, Kitty had not felt the same way. She'd made no secret of it, either. Wanda remembered declaring her love that one time by the pier, and having Kitty 'umm' and 'aah' and 'I don't know' her way into a bout of hurried sex that prevented further conversation.

And that was the biggest hurt of all – the honesty. Kitty had been totally, brutally honest with Wanda. Yet Wanda had still nursed some seed, some germ of hope that things might still work out for them. After all, Lance was a jerk. He was the evil ex, and everyone knew the evil ex was supposed to saunter off into the sunset with some new thang on his arm, while the heroine cried into her pillow and found true happiness in the arms of another. Sometimes he even made bigoted and/or racist comments while doing it. That was how you knew he was evil.

And suddenly Wanda wanted to hurt both of them. She wanted to march up to Lance and say loudly, "Hey, y'know what? Your girlfriend is a giant dyke, and we once had sex in the attic, right above your room. And y'know what else? You were in there, asleep in your bed at the time."

She wondered if the hot, furious feeling behind her eyes was what books and movies called betrayal. However, another part of her told her that was ridiculous. It wasn't like Kitty ever promised her anything in the first place. Scrupulous Kitty had made it clear that their relationship was not founded on true love or meant-to-be, happily-ever-after.

And now Wanda knew why.

"Hey, Cuddlebumps." Todd blinked in surprise as she made a small noise, like a bird hitting a windshield. "S'a'ight now. S'all over. We won."

A large bulb of water plopped off her nose. "Yeah," she said. "It's all over."

* * *

5.

Her bed was not quite brand new, but less than sixteen years old, which was an improvement on the last one. The mattress did not have any funny bumps and indents made by past bodies, and the pillows – two of them! – had feathers instead of squashed synthetic fibres. The bedspread was pale blue and edged with yellow, not really her style, but probably more relaxing than her chosen colour scheme. The woman who outfitted the room had said something about feng shui, making Wanda promise not to change the furniture around because it would obstruct the flow of energies.

Personally, Wanda thought it was a bunch of hokum. However, the woman had been financing, so she'd smiled whenever she was around and switched things the moment she and her design team left.

So, there was her bed. It was comfortable, the epitome of cosy, and smelled like lavender from the pouch she slipped under the covers every morning.

And it royally sucked, because it seemed to send our subliminal messages: here I am, you know you're tired, so just get in and go to sleep. I'm all ready and waiting. There's plenty of room. And why wouldn't there be? You're not in me yet, and who else would be here, in your bed, late at night?

It was distracting, alongside the whispering in her head. She tried to ignore everything while shoving things into a kitbag, humming a song she'd heard on the radio that morning. She didn't know all the words, but the tune was catchy and it drowned out most of it.

Books and teen dramas said the first week was the hardest part, because those seven days contain all the firsts. _This is my first Monday morning without her. This is the first time I've gone to the park. This is my first trip to the store for ice cream. This is my first trip past the school without going in to see her. This is the first Friday night without a sleepy auburn head curled against my breast. _Theoretically, it was supposed to get easier once you could stop adding the 'first' prefix.

Wanda was divided over where she should mark these firsts from – the break up on the park bench, or the realisation that Kitty and Lance were an item again? If the former, then she'd already been through all the firsts. If the latter, then she had to go through them a second time – which sort of defeated the point, if you thought about it. The latter should have been better, then, since she had proof that life went on, that the word 'first' had no real meaning, and that ginseng shampoo was available for all to use. Yet without another glut of firsts to occupy her, the prospect of saying "This is my hundredth Ben and Jerry's without her" was infinitely more horrifying.

It had been three days since Apocalypse fell. The X-Men had offered to shield the Brotherhood from the consequential media frenzy, with the result that Fred, Todd, Pietro and Lance had moved into rooms at the mansion while Magneto recuperated in the med-lab there. Colossus had also taken up the offer, though nobody had realised until then that he cared so much about Magneto. He'd barely moved out of sickbay since arriving.

Wanda had gone with them, too, but her perspective on the whole thing had tilted so much that she'd moved back to the Boarding House after only one night – the reporters having abandoned the place when everyone holed up at the house that Chuck built. Kitty's room had been next to hers, that redhead telepath the other side.

_This is my first night back in the Boarding House. This is my first breakfast here. This is my first burnt toast. These are my first morning cartoons. This is my first shower. This..._

Ghost hands all over her, a memory of that time Pietro dragged the boys off on some fake rescue mission and Kitty came over to convince her that vegetarian hotdogs were just as good as meat. They had spilled lime cordial on the rug, making a green stain that refused to come out. Some of it had got on Kitty's tee shirt, and Wanda's offer to wash it out in the sink had resulted in slow kisses, deep shudders and the taste of girl on her lips. Kitty never made a noise when she came, just screwed up her eyes and rolled her stomach, as if in pain.

Wanda shook her head and used a hex bolt to flip over the rug so she wouldn't have to look at the stain.

There were too many memories around this place. Everywhere she looked, there was another one she found herself either doubting or being hurt by. She remembered first moving here with Pietro, after Daniels came to challenge her brother for stuff that happened in New York. Except that she also remembered being introduced to the Brotherhood by Mystique, and being held in Agatha's deceptively strong arms while the witch leeched out excess power that made her skin sore. She remembered her first day at school, but not the last. She could picture Kitty in her Shadowcat costume, but never remember the first time she saw her in it, or her first incident with the X-Men beyond an escalator and a sense of anger.

The only reasonable solution was to get away from it all, at least for a while. She hadn't told anyone she was going, mainly because she didn't know a destination, or even how long she'd be gone. Maybe she'd never come back to Bayville. Maybe she'd make a whole new set of memories, so this haphazard mental cinema could be boxed up and shelved where it couldn't confuse her anymore. Or maybe she'd come running back within the week, in which case it hardly mattered if she told anyone she was going. Planning required her to think beyond the moment-to-moment existence that was keeping her from insanity.

She had some money, and Pietro kept a stash under his mattress. Families were supposed to look out for each other, and Wanda nursed some deep-seated notion that he owed her anyway. It was preposterous, of course. Pietro had always been there for her, even since they were kids.

Still, needs must when the devil drives. She had over four hundred dollars to work with, and then... well, then she'd wing it. What good was the power to bend possibility if you couldn't use it a little selfishly now and then?

She loaded up and fished in her pocket for a key, which she pushed into a plant pot on the porch once she'd locked the front door. Then, casting a last, long look up at the Boarding House, she turned on her heel and started the walk for the train station.

Halfway along the street, she began mumbling bits of the song she'd been humming. It seemed a fitting farewell, or 'see you later', or whatever.

"She can kill with a smile, she can wound with her eyes. She can ruin your faith with her casual lies. Hmm, hmm, hmm... and she only reveals what she wants you to see. She hides like a child but she's always a woman to me..."

New life meant new beginnings. That's what books and movies said. You went off and discovered yourself, and if you ever came home, you were a better person for it.

Ghost hands of a self-appointed 'good person' felt the back of Wanda's neck. Tendrils of guilt and ache and joy curled around her fingers, and her mind writhed like an overturned basket of snakes. The night was chilly for the season, and she drew her coat further around her.

Only in books and movies.

Moment-to-moment, that was the kicker.

* * *

FINIS.

* * *


End file.
